The Cartel (29 page)

The chick is drinking a mojito—of course she is—and Eddie has the bartender set up another for her. She looks over at Eddie, lifts her glass in thanks, and Eddie smiles back.

He’s going to get up in that tonight.

Then an explosion goes off.

—

Chuy goes in heavy.

Okay, a little too heavy.

Okay, a
lot
too heavy.

He knows Ruiz’s rep. He’s seen the video and doesn’t want to star in Ruiz’s next movie, and he knows that the Punta Bar is a Tapia hangout and that Ruiz will have people there.

Chuy got orders to go to Acapulco to take out this guy, this Eddie Ruiz.

Because what the fuck, right?

Why not?

Ruiz is looking for men, Zeta
sicarios.
He’s not going to have his eyes open for some eleven-year-old kid. Plus, this is a
chance.
If Bruno Resendez was worth $150K, Eddie Ruiz—public enemy
número uno
—has to have a price tag of what, half a million? A mil? More? And if Esteban could buy him a car, he could also buy him a house. Two houses—one for him and one for
Mami
and
Papi.

It’s Chuy’s fantasy, rolling up on the house in his sled, walking in and saying,
No more digging ditches, Papi, no more cutting hair, Mami
—and handing them the keys to their new house on the other side of Laredo. A nine-bedroom house—a room for everyone and a Guatemalan maid to keep it clean.

If he takes Eddie Ruiz off the count, Forty and Ochoa will throw him a party, give him coke, make him an officer, give him his own plaza to run. He’ll boss Gabe around, shit, he’ll boss Esteban around. People will treat him with respect, whisper,
That’s the guy who did Eddie Ruiz. That’s Chuy Barajos, Jesus the Kid, the
macho
who walked into the Punta Bar on his own and…

Chuy opens the door and tosses in a grenade.

Then he unslings the
erre
and opens up.

—

Eddie jumps on Ilsa, throws her to the floor, and lies on top of her.

Pulls the Glock and looks up.

It’s ugly. People hold their bleeding faces, shards of glass sticking out. One of his flunkies looks down, staring, at his severed left arm. Bottles behind the bar shatter and then the mirror goes. Bullets zing, people go down, women scream,
men
scream…

Fucking Zetas, Eddie thinks—the place is
packed
with civilians. This is not the way you do things. He looks for the shooters but only sees one, a spindly-looking little dude standing in the doorway spraying fire like this is some sort of video game.

Ain’t no replay, asshole, Eddie thinks.

He sights the bead on the shooter’s chest.

The shooter sees him, swings his rifle, and fires.

—

Chuy drops the AR and
runs.

Runs the way that only a scared boy can run, fast and fluid, through the streets. Doesn’t dare turn his head to see if they’re coming after him.

Tells himself you gotta be alive to spend the money. Gotta be alive to buy your mom and dad the house. Except the Zetas will take care of them—that was the promise, that was the oath. A soldier falls in combat, his family will be taken care of. Ochoa told him that himself, on graduation night before…

Chuy runs until he’s out of breath.

Stops and looks around.

Hears the sirens, sees the ambulances speed past him, going the other way, toward the Punta Bar.

An hour later he’s on a bus, heading up the coast to the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Zeta country, to collect his beautiful reward for killing Eddie Ruiz.

—

Four dead, twenty-five wounded.

A real mess.

It takes Eddie three hours to get Forty on the phone, but when he does he says, “What the fuck? You’re so desperate for men now you’re using midgets?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That pygmy you sent,” Eddie says, “was even smaller than your dick. Good job, by the way—he hit a dozen civilians and one of them’s dead. Lobbing a grenade into a public place? Is this the way we play now?”

Forty hangs up.

Eddie turns to Ilsa, who’s sitting on his bed.

The sex had been incredible—something about that near-death experience thing, he guesses.

“Crazy night, huh?” he says.

—

Chuy goes to the address of the safe house they gave him.

Gabe and Esteban are there waiting for him, and Chuy smiles at them.

“Forty wants to see you,” Esteban says.

Chuy smiles. Of course Forty wants to see him. When he gets into the room, Forty stands up and slaps him so hard across the face Chuy thinks he might black out. His head spinning, he says, “But I killed Ruiz.”

“No you didn’t,” Forty says. “You missed.”

“I saw—”

Forty slaps him again. “A
grenade
?! You throw a grenade into a bar full of tourists, and then start shooting?! Are you stupid?! Are you crazy?!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Make it hurt,” Forty snaps.

Gabe and Esteban grab Chuy and drag him up the stairs. They strip him, tie his wrists to a rope, run the rope through a pulley, haul him up until he’s barely on his toes, then tie the other end of the rope off on a bolt in the floor.

Esteban hands Gabe a thick leather strap. Walking behind Chuy, Gabe says softly, “Sorry, dude.”

He takes a swallow of Coke, the good Mexican Coke in a bottle with all the sugar, then starts in with a leather strap on Chuy’s back, on his ass, on his legs. Takes another hit of Coke, sets the bottle down on the floor, and starts whipping him again.

Chuy tries not to scream, but his determination doesn’t last past the third stroke.

It hurts bad.

He screams and twists and cries.

Begs.

Like the little bitch he knows he is.

Finally, Esteban says, “Enough.”

He picks up a length of two-by-four and shows it to Chuy. “You know what I’m going to do?”

Chuy knows.

La paleta
is a Zeta specialty they taught at the training camp.

You take a piece of board and hit someone in the lower back. Slowly, rhythmically, again and again. The victim wants to die a long time before he does. Sometimes they stop before they kill him, and then the man is a cripple, barely able to walk, groaning every time he takes a piss.

Chuy had seen those guys and laughed at them.

Now Esteban steps behind him.

Chuy breaks down sobbing.

“Bitch,” Esteban says. “You’re nothing but a little bitch after all.”

“Bitch,” Gabe chimes in. “Fag.”

“You think about it,” Esteban says. “You think about what’s going to happen to you,
perrita.
”

He unties the rope and Chuy falls to the floor.

“Forty wants to do it himself,” Esteban says.

—

Chuy lies fetal on the floor.

His blood sticks to the wooden planks.

Gabe sits with his back propped against the wall. “I’m sorry, dude.”

Chuy don’t answer.

“You don’t know,” Gabe says. “You don’t know what they make you do. At the ranch. One after the other. One after the other. Like a machine, dude. Then we burn them. Put them in drums and burn them.”

Chuy don’t want to listen, don’t want to feel sorry for Gabe. Fuck him, they aren’t about to beat
him
to death. He closes his eyes and doesn’t open them again until Gabe finally shuts up.

He looks over at Gabe’s eyes.

His
blue
eyes.

Staring back at him, unseeing.

Chuy wriggles across the floor like a snake. Grabs the Coke bottle and smashes it against the wall. It wakes Gabe up but Chuy is already on top of him and slashes the jagged glass across his throat.

Gabe tries to keep his blood in, but it spurts out his carotid artery.

Tries to yell, but his throat is cut.

Naked, his wrists still bound together in front of him, Chuy jumps out the window.

Morelia, Michoacán

A whore finds Chuy two weeks later, sleeping in a Dumpster in the alley off the street she works.

Flor is young and Guatemalan. She came up from the Petén when the Kaibiles came in and forced her family off their land. They rode a train into Mexico, hoping to make it to the U.S., but somewhere in Quintana Roo, police stopped the train and forced them off.

The men took her father and brothers away—she doesn’t know where.

They took her, too, to the city of Morelia, and told her that she’d have good work as a waitress, that she would make money that she could send to her family. She did work in the restaurant, washing dishes and the floor, but they told her that she owed the money she made as rent for the room above the restaurant she shared with twelve other girls.

She learned the truth from these girls.

Learned that the men—the “Zetas”—would put her on the street to have sex with men who paid them.

At first she didn’t believe them, but then she learned to believe.

One at a time, men taught her to believe.

In the front seats of cars, they taught her to believe. In cheap dirty rooms, they taught her to believe. Bent over trash cans in an alley, they taught her to believe.

Now Flor stands under the pools of streetlamp lights in clothes that shame her, and she calls to the men in cars in words that shame her, bidding them to do things that shame her, for money that shames her.

She doesn’t send money to her family. The men told her that they would help her find them, but never did.

The money her shame makes goes for rent, goes for food, for clothes, for makeup, it goes to the doctors for medicine, it goes to pay for the train that she rode. The money goes to the “interest” on her debt that grows every day, no matter how much shame she makes at night.

The money used to go for drugs.

She started shooting heroin that washed away her shame like a moist and soothing cloud full of rain, that brought dreams of her beautiful home in the Petén, her parents, her brothers. Her heroin dreams were green and soft and beautiful like her home.

But heroin cost money.

The men would always give it to her, but they would add it to her “tab,” and as she got deeper and deeper into addiction she fell deeper and deeper in debt, until the men had her working all the time and she shamed herself ten, twelve, fourteen times a night.

Not that she felt shame any longer.

Not that she felt anything.

Then Flor found the Lord.

Not the Catholic god of her childhood, but a loving Lord.

Jehovah God.

A man bought her on the street one night, took her to a dim and dirty room, but instead of taking her, asked, “Child, my sister, do you know the Lord?”

He read to her from the Bible, and then
gave
her a book, the one written by the leader, a man named Nazario. He came to see her every night, when the men weren’t watching, when the other girls weren’t watching, and he told her that Jesus loved her, that the Lord loved her, Nazario loved her, and that if she accepted that love she would see her family again in heaven. She read the book and he took her to meet other people, other brothers and sisters, in a house where they live and call themselves a family.

One night there Nazario walked over to her, rolled up her sleeves, and saw the needle tracks, and he gently said,
“You don’t need this, my sister,”
and that was the truth and she believed. He taught her to believe.

That while her body might be a slave, her soul is free.

She gave up the heroin.

This night Flor is standing at the edge of the alley and she hears something in the Dumpster and thinks it’s a rat, but then she sees this boy climb out, this child. He looks startled to see her and starts to run, but she asks, “Are you hungry?”

The boy nods.

“Wait here,” she says.

She goes into the restaurant’s kitchen and asks the cook for some scraps—some meat, a little chicken, a corn tortilla—and brings it out into the alley.

The boy is still there and she hands him the food.

He eats like a ravenous dog.

Flor asks, “What’s your name?”

“Pedro,” he lies.

“Do you have a place to stay?” Flor asks him.

Chuy shakes his head.

“I can take you to a place where you can sleep,” she says. “Jesus loves you.”

This is how Chuy joins La Familia Michoacana.

—

Now Chuy lives in an old house with twenty or so other people, most of them young, most of them otherwise homeless. Some are girls, or even boys, who work the street. Others sell candy, flowers, or newspapers from traffic islands.

Chuy gets a different job, delivering food to orphanages, homeless shelters, and drug clinics. He hops in a van or a pickup truck in the morning and spends the day unloading boxes of rice, pasta, powdered milk and cereal, big vats of soup, cookies and candies, all labeled “With love from La Familia.”

At the drug rehab clinics they deliver something else in addition to the food—copies of the Book:
The Sayings of Nazario.
Sometimes an adult stays behind at the clinic to talk to the addicts, tell them about Jehovah God and Jesus Christ and Nazario. As the weeks go by, Chuy notices that some of the patients he saw at the clinic come to live at the house or work on the delivery trucks.

At night, Chuy has supper at the house, and then goes to the meeting where they discuss the Bible and the Book, and then sometimes he hangs around the restaurant near the block where Flor works or he sits at home and slogs painfully through the Book, because he was never very good at reading, in Spanish or English. But with Flor’s help, he makes it through, and memorizes key sayings. His favorite is, “A true man needs a cause, an adventure, and a good woman to rescue.”

On Sunday mornings everyone goes to church, and on special occasions Nazario himself comes to preach—the good word about Jehovah God and Jesus Christ and how to live right and do the right things, and Chuy sees Flor’s eyes light up when she gazes at Nazario, and after the service they line up to get his blessing and Chuy is excited in a way he hasn’t been since he first met Ochoa, which now seems like a lifetime ago, because now he has a new life—he loves Jehovah God and Jesus Christ. He loves Nazario.